It's Time That We End the Equal Pay Myth

Holidays are sometimes moved for the convenience of the calendar. Each year, Americans celebrate George Washington’s birthday on the third Monday of February – not on his actual birthday, which is February 22 – to ensure that the public has a long weekend. Yet the logic behind declaring Tuesday, April 17, “Equal Pay Day” as the feminist movement has dubbed it, is increasingly flawed.

Equal Pay Day is supposed to represent the day that women have finally earned enough to make up for last year’s wage gap. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, full-time working women earned 81 percent of what full-time working men earned in 2010 (the most recent data available), leaving a “gap” of 19 percent between the sexes. But that means to make up for that “under-payment,” women would have to work through March 10. So we are celebrating Equal Pay Day more than a month late.Yet the mistaken logic of Equal Pay Day goes deeper than this simple calculation. Equal Pay Day presumes that the difference between men and women’s average earnings stems from discrimination, as President Obama suggested in his official proclamation last year: “I call upon all Americans to recognize the full value of women’s skills and their significant contributions to the labor force, acknowledge the injustice of wage discrimination, and join efforts to achieve equal pay.”

The wage gap statistic, however, doesn’t compare two similarly situated co-workers of different sexes, working in the same industry, performing the same work, for the same number of hours a day. It merely reflects the median earnings of all men and women classified as full-time workers.

The Department of Labor’s Time Use Survey, for example, finds that the average full-time working man spends 8.14 hours a day on the job, compared to 7.75 hours for the full-time working woman. Employees who work more likely earn more. Men working five percent longer than women alone explains about one-quarter of the wage gap.

There are numerous other factors that affect pay. Most fundamentally, men and women tend to gravitate toward different industries. Feminists may charge that women are socialized into lower-paying sectors of the economy. But women considering the decisions they’ve made likely have a different view. Women tend to seek jobs with regular hours, more comfortable conditions, little travel, and greater personal fulfillment. Often times, women are willing to trade higher pay for jobs with other characteristics that they find attractive.

Men, in contrast, often take jobs with less desirable characteristics in pursuit of higher pay. They work long hours and overnight shifts. They tar roofs in the sun, drive trucks across the country, toil in sewer systems, stand watch as prison guards, and risk injury on fishing boats, in coal mines, and in production plants. Such jobs pay more than others because otherwise no one would want to do them.

Unsurprisingly, children play an important role in men and women’s work-life decisions. Simply put, women who have children or plan to have children tend to be willing to trade higher pay for more kid-friendly positions. In contrast, men with children typically seek to earn more money in order to support children, sometimes taking on more hours and less attractive positions to do so.

Academics can debate why men and women make these different choices. The important takeaway, however, is that there are many reasons that men and women on average earn different amounts. It’s a mistake to assume that “wage gap” statistics reflect on-the-job discrimination.

Women have many reasons to celebrate today. Women are increasingly taking on leadership roles in businesses around the world. Technology is increasingly creating more flexible work arrangements, creating new options for parents to combine work and family life. Women are excelling academically (earning far more college degrees than men). Given that the economy tends to place a premium on education, we can expect women to contribute (and earn!) more in the future.

Feminists may protest, but American women aren’t the victims of a sexist economy. It’s time to declare an end to the Equal Pay Day myth.

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“Additionally, widespread studies have proven that more than 40% of the gender wage gap is due (not do) to unexplained factors.”

That is an assertion you are going to have to back up by pointing to these “widespread studies”. Oh, and since they’re “widespread”, be sure to find one that isn’t authored by a feminist group, particularly one that banks on the gender wage gap to make their money.

Furthermore, “unexplained” is not the same as discrimination, it just means factors not already factored for. Given we can’t see the studies, we can’t point out the obvious things they likely missed.

When did she say there is “no such thing” as gender discrimination in the workforce or pay disparity based on gender? She said the oft-cited “pay gap” figures are not the result of sex discrimination. Certain the discrimination exists but it’s not so widespread as to be the cause of the pay gap. Never married childless women *outearn* their male counterparts, so if anything the pay gap shows men are discriminated against. In reality, when you look at the other factors, it’s not a reflection of discrimination period.

That just sounds like what anyone would say during a negotiation. It sounds like a response to an employee seeking a raise. The employee should have responded: “the question is not what I NEED, because let’s face it, if that were the question, you shouldn’t be getting paid what you are getting paid. Instead, the question is if I’m getting paid as much as I could be getting paid somewhere else, and why on earth I should continue to stay here.” However, because the employee either doesn’t know how to negotiate for a raise or because the employee has a very weak negotiating position, it’s simply easier to cry “discrimination.” The employer, however, never said “you can’t have a raise BECAUSE WE DON’T GIVE RAISES TO WOMEN.” See the difference, or do you not want to see the difference?

It may not of been because you were a female, but because the boss in question was just an insensitive dirtbag. He may of had the same response to a single male who asked for more money (I am assuming this was in a response to asking for a pay raise). Just pointing out another view about your question.

You are responsible for your own financial welfare, if you are worth more than you are being paid than you demand more or get a new job. That is how a free market works, it’s pretty simple. I am amazed at how many people think someone else should take care of them.

SMSin, if any woman can prove that she was paid less for the same job, same hours, same responsibilities, same seniority, etc., as a male she would have a prima fascia discrimination case that lawyers would line up to represent.

And since grammar tips are being traded in this thread, I’d like to point out the the the proper phrase for the alleged disparity in pay is “sex discrimination.” Gender is A grammatical category used in the classification of nouns, pronouns, adjectives. Humans don’t have a gender, they have a sex.

Your boss is an idiot….simple as that. Most bosses understand the importance of pay equity. I worked in hospital with 2,000 employees, and 85% were females. They dominated the higher paying professional jobs and males were paid the SAME as females.

More importantly, see what the news in USA TODAY was 2 years ago: Women ages 22 to 30 with no husband and no kids earn a median $27,000 a year, 8% more than comparable men in the top 366 metropolitan areas, according to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau data crunched by the New York research firm Reach Advisors and released Wednesday. The women out-earn men in 39 of the 50 biggest cities and match them in another eight. The disparity is greatest in Atlanta, where young, childless single women earn 21% more than male counterparts.

Well, when I was single and in my early-mid twenties and asked for a raise my male boss (who had a large family) told me exactly the same thing. So perhaps its not always gender discrimination but instead it is those who have families sometimes feel they are justified in keeping a bigger slice of the pie.